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“local, national, international news or current affairs which is impartial, factual and objective”.
The words “impartial, factual and objective” are very important. Perhaps I can share a little anecdote with the House. Hon. Members will recall that the Prime Minister addressed Members of the European Parliament, and his speech was covered by the BBC reporter Mark Mardell. In advance of live questions to the Prime Minister, the Member of the European Parliament for South East England, Mr. Daniel Hannan, notified Mr. Mardell that he would be making what he regarded as rather a newsworthy contribution to the debate. Mr. Mardell chose to ignore that and to absent himself from the Chamber, and as a result Mr. Hannan’s contribution was not recorded by the BBC. However, we know that it was recorded by Mr. Hannan and put on YouTube.
Within a matter of hours, more than 2 million people had looked at the YouTube content of Mr. Hannan’s pertinent criticisms of the Prime Minister. I can recall collecting my son from a friend’s house in Surrey that same afternoon and I was immediately told, “You must come and look at this. Have you seen this on YouTube?” I had not, so I looked at it. Over those 24 hours, it was something that everybody had to see. I think that it was a brilliant piece of parliamentary behaviour by Mr. Hannan, for which I commend him warmly. I am sure that that is not the only reason he was so successful in the recent European elections and is the leading Conservative in the South East of England.
Mr. Brooks Newmark (Braintree) (Con): In fact, in less than 24 hours that recording became a worldwide phenomenon. Friends of mine from the far east and the United States e-mailed me the hyperlink to the speech. I had no idea that it had happened until friends of mine on the west coast of the United States e-mailed me and said, “You must see this.”
Mr. Chope: I am grateful for that extra information on the worldwide appeal of our friend Dan Hannan MEP.
The point of the story is that after that occurred I wrote to Sir Michael Lyons, who I thought was the custodian of impartiality in the BBC. My letter to him, dated 8 April, was passed on to the director-general of the BBC, Mark Thompson. He was kind enough to respond personally to me on 27 May, apologising for the delay in his response. He recited the concern expressed in my letter, and said that he had asked colleagues in BBC News for their perspective. He said:
“They, like me, are sorry to learn that you felt that Mr. Hannan’s speech received insufficient coverage.”
Mr. Thompson did not even concede that he thought that it had received insufficient coverage. In a sense, he was criticising those 2 million-plus people who found great enjoyment and entertainment in seeing the clip. He went on to say:
“Choosing which stories to include in bulletins is of course a subjective matter”—
“and BBC News do acknowledge that not every viewer or listener will feel we get it right every time.”
“the main story of the day on Tuesday March 24 concerned the comments by the Governor of the Bank of England on the desirability of further fiscal stimulation. The clip of Gordon Brown at the European Parliament was used as part of the reports on BBC News outlets in the context of the wider story, rather than as a report simply of the PM’s speech to the European Parliament.”
The letter went on to say that I would have noted that, two days later, Mr. Hannan was interviewed on BBC News and on the “PM” programme. However, he was only interviewed then because 2 million people had seen the clip on YouTube and were wondering why there had not been a report on BBC News in the first place. To try to explain the issue by saying, “Well, we covered the story of the 2 million YouTube viewers” misses the point completely. The BBC went on to say—perhaps this is Mr. Mardell speaking in code—that Mr. Hannan was
“‘completely perplexed and slightly stunned’ by the global reaction to the speech.”
That is what my friend, Dan Hannan, had said about it, with typical modesty, but I think that a lot of licence fee payers were completely perplexed and slightly stunned by the fact that Mr. Mardell had not felt it necessary to include the incident in his reports from Strasbourg on the day.
What was the conclusion from Mr. Thompson? By the way, I think that he is on £800,000 a year, but it does not matter about that. He ended:
“Thank you for bringing your concerns to our attention. I hope my letter has at least served to explain the thinking behind this editorial decision.”
That is wholly inadequate. In fact, it is contemptuous. He is saying to those 2 million people, “To hell with it. We made that decision; we’re standing by it. We’re not even prepared to admit that we made an error of judgment in failing to anticipate the significance of that question to the Prime Minister.” We have a lot to do before we can be sure that the “public service content” of some BBC news programmes satisfies the criteria of being impartial, factual and objective.
The second element of “public service content” to which I draw attention is the fact that it should include content whose primary purpose
“is to inform, educate or entertain children”.
A lot of us are concerned that in the present squeeze on funding for public service broadcasting, traditional children’s programmes are losing out. The definition of “public service content” in my Bill would ensure that programmes designed to inform, educate or entertain children would have a high priority and could draw on licence fee revenue as programmes that contained public service content.
The third category is content whose primary purpose is “charitable or religious”. That speaks for itself. Again, there has been a lot of concern that religious or charitable objectives in broadcasting are being squeezed out in the BBC’s never-ceasing search for higher viewing figures.
The fourth criterion would be that the content was not otherwise likely to be provided by the market responding to consumer demand. That criterion reflects the thinking
of, for example, the Culture, Media and Sport Committee in its report. I am delighted that my hon. Friend the Member for Shipley (Philip Davies) is a member of that Committee and may be able to inform us of some of its thinking later.
Mr. David Heath (Somerton and Frome) (LD): I am listening carefully to the hon. Gentleman and the criteria that he is setting out. Am I right in assuming that he does not believe that the BBC should ever televise sport, which is not part of any of those criteria? Can he explain to me the rationale behind asking the National Audit Office, which is an estimable body in all sorts of ways, to act, in effect, as critics of future programming and to decide which programmes are going to be flops and which are not?
Mr. Chope: I shall deal with the National Audit Office in a moment. On the hon. Gentleman’s reference to sport, none of the criteria would prevent the BBC from showing any programmes, but it would be able to be subsidised from the licence fee only if the programmes it was producing met the criteria of public service content, so if the BBC wanted to produce programmes such as those on BBC 3, to which I referred earlier, it would still be able to do that. Similarly, it would still be able to provide sporting programmes, and those would be funded by the licence fee if the BBC could establish that the content would not otherwise be likely to be provided by the market responding to consumer demand.
Mr. Heath: So I am right in saying that all the major sporting occasions, which many people look forward to seeing on the BBC, would not meet the hon. Gentleman’s test and would not be able to be televised by the BBC under his proposals. People who could not afford to pay a subscription charge would not be able to see— [Interruption.] The hon. Member for Shipley (Philip Davies) says from a sedentary position, “ITV.” ITV is losing contracts for major sporting events because it cannot afford them. What the hon. Member for Christchurch (Mr. Chope) is saying is, “Either you subscribe or, sorry, the grand national, the test matches, the football cup finals are not for you.”
Mr. Chope: The hon. Gentleman misses the point big time. One of the reasons fewer sporting events are now on independent television is that the BBC, with the benefit of unlimited public subsidies through the licence fee, has been bidding up the price to such an extent that ITV cannot afford to show such events. I argue that if the content can be provided by the market responding to consumer demand, it is wrong that it should be funded by the licence fee payer, who is effectively paying a mandatory poll tax for the privilege of being able to have broadcast receiving equipment.
Philip Davies:
My hon. Friend might be interested to know that I was at No. 10 Downing street today with Sir Peter O’Sullevan and Frankie Dettori handing in a petition to save horse-racing coverage on the BBC, to which I think the Minister is also sympathetic. The BBC is cutting some of the lower grade races to cherry-pick the big racing. Horse racing cuts right across the social divide, unlike any other sport, and people like me were brought up with fantastic people like Peter O’Sullevan, who encapsulated quality on the BBC. Does my hon.
Friend agree that it is much more worthwhile for the BBC to cover horse racing, rather than spending £18 million on people such as Jonathan Ross?
Mr. Chope: My hon. Friend makes an excellent point. I regret the fact that much horse racing has been marginalised.
Continuing with a response to the intervention from the hon. Member for Somerton and Frome (Mr. Heath), sport that was not provided by the market responding to consumer demand could still be funded out of the licence fee. So the example of synchronised swimming on BBC 3 that I quoted earlier might be able to get funding on that criterion, but the hon. Gentleman misses the main issue relating to the funding of sport on the television.
“Where the only criterion of public service content is that contained in subsection (2)(d)”—
in other words, in the case of market failure—
“the judgement relating to the likelihood of market failure shall be made by the National Audit Office, which must publish an opinion on any matter referred to it by the Secretary of State pursuant to this section.”
That is because we cannot really trust the BBC to make its own judgments about the likelihood of market failure. Clause 1(3) would introduce a degree of external audit and objectivity into the equation.
“No content shall be public service content if it fails to satisfy prevailing standards of good taste and decency.”
I hope that that would have the support of all Members without demur, because a lot of the current output does not satisfy prevailing standards of good taste and decency. People may want to watch or listen to vulgarity and smut, but why should it be funded by a poll tax on licence fee payers?
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport (Mr. Gerry Sutcliffe) rose—
Mr. Chope: I give way to the Minister, who I am delighted to see in his place.
Mr. Sutcliffe: Although I agree with the hon. Gentleman that we would want to see good taste and decency, who would be responsible for monitoring that and making decisions? Would it be the National Audit Office?
Mr. Chope: No, it would not, because I am not sure that the National Audit Office is qualified to do that. However, the National Audit Office would be able to receive complaints from people who, for example, felt that money from the television licence fee had been expended on programmes that only purported to have public service content complying with the prevailing standards of good taste and decency. The National Audit Office would be able to adjudicate after the event if such complaints were made.
I would expect the providers of content to try to apply standards that they would set and monitor themselves. Although I have already expressed my scepticism about how the BBC Trust operates, I did not think it reasonable to remove any sense of self-regulation from the Bill completely. I do not know whether this is a criticism of
the Minister, but clause 1(4) would, I accept, rely to a large extent on self-regulation in the first instance, although it would be subject to audit after the event.
Clause 1 is linked to the payment of the licence fee, because as clause 2(1) says:
“No licence fee revenue shall be paid to the BBC by the Secretary of State for services which do not satisfy the criteria of public service content in section 1.”
It may come as a bit of a surprise to some people to learn that the licence fee revenue does not go directly to the BBC. Rather, the royal charter says:
“‘the licence fee revenue’ means any sums which may be paid to the BBC by the Secretary of State from time to time, pursuant to any Framework Agreement, to fund the services provided by the BBC for the promotion of its Public Purposes”.
The money is therefore under the control of the Secretary of State. Under the terms of the royal charter, it is for the Secretary of State to decide how much of that money should go to the BBC. If the amount of content produced by the BBC that could be funded out of the licence fee were much reduced—which, unless the BBC wanted to change its agenda significantly, is what I suspect would happen under the terms of the Bill—there would be more money, either to reduce the licence fee or to be made available to broadcasters and providers that did want to produce public service content in accordance with the criteria set out in clause 1.
If one looks at the mass of documents currently circulating in the lively debate on the issue, one sees among other things a set of very patronising statements from the BBC, which in effect say, “Well, we’re not sure that there’s going to be any money left over at the end to prop up shortfalls in funding for public service content from rival channels and organisations.” We know that a large amount of public service content online is currently funded without any subsidy, but it could be eligible for subsidy. We know also that ITV is being squeezed by the severe drop-off in advertising revenue, which means that it can no longer fund its public service obligations under the current regulations. The question is not whether we should have an ITV without regional news or children’s programming; in my book, it is about how we can enable ITV to have regional news and children’s programming. The Bill is one way of enabling that.
“It shall be the duty of the National Audit Office to keep under review the total cost of public service television broadcasting”;
“In pursuance of its duty...the National Audit Office must conduct, in each calendar year...a value for money audit of the expenditure incurred on the broadcasting of public service content that is funded by the licence fee payer.”
That is highly pertinent and topical, because only a few days ago my hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough (Mr. Leigh) was challenging John Humphrys on the “Today” programme on this subject, against the background of the National Audit Office report into the BBC’s substantial waste of resources in respect of its radio output. Not only that, but my hon. Friend and the National Audit Office were critical of how the BBC fiddled the figures and has denied public access to material that should be available to the public on terms of transparency and accountability.
All that is set out on the record. We now know that there is tremendous pressure on the BBC to be more open about how much money it pays its presenters. There is an enormous article in one of our national newspapers today setting out the incredible figures involved in the salaries of some of the presenters and suggesting that they might be reviewed. Basically, the NAO report to which I have referred was suggesting that far too much money was spent on some of the high-profile presenters and not enough on the actual content. An important part of the Bill is that the National Audit Office would be brought into the frame to make sure that the money from the licence fee—the poll tax on everybody who has a television—satisfied the criteria of providing good value for money. The report on that would have to be published and laid before both Houses of Parliament.
We do not have as much time as I had hoped for, Mr. Deputy Speaker, so I shall not refer to the wealth of other material that I have to hand. I say with all modesty that the House has to address the big lacuna of there being no definition of public service content. I put forward the Bill as a stab at that. It might not be the final answer, but I hope that it will inspire my hon. Friend the Member for Wantage (Mr. Vaizey), who is to speak from my party’s Front Bench, to go along similar lines when we get into government. In that way, there could be a level playing field for all the media and communications outlets, and a common description of the criteria for public service content. There could be equal funding for all public service content and equal access to public subsidy, when it is deserved.
1.59 pm
Mr. Edward Vaizey (Wantage) (Con): My hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch (Mr. Chope) has introduced an important Bill. Before I address the detail, it is important to understand the context in which the Bill is being debated.
People are right to be concerned that this Government have lost their way as regards broadcasting policy. Next week, on 16 June, we are expecting the publication of the Digital Britain report, yet we meet in the House today having lost the former Secretary of State, the right hon. Member for Leigh (Andy Burnham), who has been in charge of this consultation and has now gone to the Department of Health. We learned from our newspapers yesterday and this morning that the Minister responsible for Digital Britain, Lord Carter, is set to resign very shortly after the report has been published; rumour has it that he may be on his way to Australia. Having put forward the framework, he is to abandon the sinking ship that is this Government’s broadcasting policy.
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